‘Zinkish’

For Nell Zink ’85, the course of literary life never did run smooth. After graduation, she worked first as a bricklayer with Jack Peet Masonry in Williamsburg and then as a secretary in Washington, D.C., before moving to New York, Philadelphia, Israel and Germany, finding work as a translator.

Through it all, Zink was writing. But she wasn’t always writing for a reader. “I knew that writing was something that I did, that I’d always done and would always do, but it never occurred to me that anyone else would want to read it,” she says.

People do want to read Zink’s writing. So much so that three of her novels — “The Wallcreeper,” “Mislaid” and “Avalon” — became New York Times Notable Books and one, “Mislaid,” was longlisted for the National Book Award.

In April, she received a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, becoming part of the 100th class of fellows supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The prestigious award recognizes Zink’s previous contributions to fiction and potential for future success. (James Dwyer, Arthur B. Hanson Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School, was also awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, for his contributions to the field of philosophy.)

Zink was born in California and moved to Virginia’s Tidewater region when she was 8 years old. She documented her observations of the region’s social norms and prejudices in her novel “Mislaid,” which follows a woman crossing sexual and racial boundaries in the mid-20th century.

In “Mislaid,” the main character, who is white, assumes a Black identity for herself and her younger child to escape her failing marriage. “I wrote that book just to process the weirdness of Tidewater in my childhood,” Zink says.

“I remember that my essay for William & Mary was one sentence, like something out of an ’80s movie: ‘I intend to wear dark glasses, read poetry and get through it somehow,’” Zink says. Despite the less-than-enthusiastic essay, the straight A’s on her high school transcript and high SAT scores got her admitted.

She entered W&M with an interest in biology, which quickly waned. First, the school closed Millington Hall to get rid of asbestos, then she learned that she didn’t have the patience for lab work. Zink might have found a more natural fit in the English department, but she wanted to study something that she didn’t have an innate talent for. She ended up in the philosophy department.

“Philosophy really interested me because there was a reality check. You would read something and then decide whether it was true, which you don’t do with literature — at least back then,” she says. “Literature lives in its own world.”

If she could go back in time, she says, “I would have done the English degree, gotten straight A’s and gone to grad school.”

Zink wasn’t completely separated from the English department, however. She worked part time with the department’s secretary, stapling evaluations and running the mimeograph machine. And Zink often took English courses when her GPA needed a boost. She remembers a writing class with Professor of English, Emeritus Peter Wiggins, who told her, “Your assignments are way too short,” but was so impressed with her talent that he gave her an A anyway.

In hindsight, she says, “God bless and save Pete Wiggins.”

Zink joined a playwriting club at W&M but soon found it didn’t fit her style. While her fellow students practiced their craft by writing new episodes of the popular TV sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati,” Zink wanted to experiment with expressionistic, romantic and “very, very deeply felt” plays.